LOTR scenario

[Gibsie]

Originally posted by justjake73
Make the mountains impassable, forcing you to go through Moria?

Maybe you could have a barracks in Moria, and have a tech that allows upgrading Gandalf the Grey to White?

Exactly what I thought

Or rather, I thought maybe make the Western gates and eastern gates separate civilisations and cities (Although they would still appear on the diplomacy screen and I don't know any way around that in Civ 3), then fill the mountains with goblins and a Balrog; make the Balrog a king-type unit so he must be killed in order to destroy the eastern gate civ and let the party out; not sure what to do about Gandalf being upgraded, maybe make the Balrog immoble by the exit and have the Gandalf the White unit blocked in... but then you'd havr the problem of two Gandalfs. Can a land unit have a flag to make it destroyed after attacking? That way you could do that and just make sure the player know that he damn well better not attack with Gandalf unless absolutely necessary

[Nanard]

good!

[Soltz]

Random thought - the Balrog could be a 'Wonder' that depending on who owns it, generates a Goblin unit each turn or allows Gandalf the Gray to be upgraded to Gandalf the White (one time)

[EnduringBlue]

I would suggest having a mithril resource necessary for an Istari Resurrection themed tech that would permit an upgrade of the Gandalf unit.

or the Gandalf unit could have a found city ability that would consume the unit, and mithril would allow construction of a 1-turn Gandalf the White GW that would generate a new gandalf (set it to 2000 turns so it won't repeat)

of course, in LOTR a settlement in moria couldn't be maintained, so no other food-helpful resources could be present in the vicinity. A new defendable moria civ would be theoretically possible but a wide departure from the source material

[mTk]

Yes, I'd also go for the mithril (or maybe something else?) resource type that is only found in Moria. After capturing Moria the barracks in there would allow Gandalf the Grey to upgrade to White... and since there's just one Gandalf in game you don't need to worry about multiple upgrades.
Human player would of course have the tech for the upgrade, but couldn't just do it without the special resource.

Then also there should be a way to make Moria starve out if not controlled by Mordor (or that dummy Moria civ)... maybe have a government that can sustain Moria when not controlled by the good guys? That way there would be enough time to upgrade Gandalf - and of course let the fellowship pass - before Moria dies out from starvation... a rather "realistic" solution, if you ask me... think about the good guys trying their best, but it's just not possible to turn Moria into an operating city and it slowly stagnates and finally dies out.

[Plotinus]

Ha, I knew we'd be inevitably seeing this! I love some of the ideas here. I'll want to play this, especially if Admiral PJ provides some film images for it. Some things are going to be tricky though - city list for Isengard, for example...? And will it be possible to play it on a random map, as well as a map of Middle Earth?

Also, when the mod comes out, I'd love to have a go at adapting it into a Silmarillion mod... one for the hard core!

There were, of course, lots of differences between the book and the films - and quite right too, as a film isn't the same thing as a book. As Peter Jackson said, you could have filmed the book scene by scene, line by line, but it would have been literally unwatchable. Some of the main differences are that in the book Frodo never went to Osgiliath at all, there were no elves at Helm's Deep, and the whole Tom Bombadil/barrow wight business was there.

Of course, such differences make no difference to a game or mod, because the whole point of such a mod is to see what happens when you do things differently. The worst thing would be a mod that forces you to do exactly what happens in the original story. I look forward to making Radagast the Brown the hero!

[Elias]

on the moria subject you could possibly make it a barbian camp and give them a special balrog unit. what about umbar though and how are you going to trick the AI into attacking helms deep? Maby victory points? also settlers should be deleted so the shire dosent end up settling the whole west and kicking everyones butt

[Elias]

what about tech too maby when you get iron working you can get urakai or somthing? I was thinking about starting a lord of the rings mod my self and was loking for ideas when i found this. I was just planing on using the regular game units and each civ would recive there own few special units. what buildings should be used to? i was thinking about making units weeled too so then gondor would have to go through the black gate. would the dwarvs have there own nation they really dont do much in the book.

[Gibsie]

Hehe, you're right about getting the AI to attack Helm's Deep; it was hard enough in Civ 2, where I did modify the excellent ROTK scenario whereby a number of Uruk Hai/ Berserker/ Siege Ballista units were created outside Helm's Deep using force-timed events, but even then they'd only actually attack Helm's Deep if I put invisible units a couple of spaces from HD to exert a ZOC and stop them running off to take Edoras... which was pretty unwieldy. It's hard to imagine it working for Civ 3.

[Sarxis]

Will Flak units shoot down the winged Nazgul? ha! j/k

Good luck on this- LotR scenarios are always a challenge.

[Elias]

I acutally started on this I made all units wheled so the ura-kai would have to go through helms deep. Please I only have 2 techs and since it would be such a short senario what else would I put in it? p.s if you want me to give you the mod so far request it and ill e-mail it to you. i need a few more opnions.

[Gibsie]

There's a complete scenario based around the fellowship just been completed and posted at Civfanatics...